1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to search engines.
2. Related Art
The development of information retrieval systems has predominantly focused on improving the overall quality of the search results presented to the user. The quality of the results has typically been measured in terms of accuracy, recall, or other quantifiable measures of performance. Information retrieval systems, or ‘search engines’ in the context of the Internet and World Wide Web, use different techniques to improve the quality and usefulness of the search results. These techniques may address certain aspects of search engine design, such as basic indexing algorithms and document representation.
An inherent problem in the design of search engines is that the relevance of search results to a particular user depends on factors that are highly dependent on the user's intent in conducting the search, that is, why they are conducting the search, as well as the user's circumstances and facts pertaining to the user's information need. Thus, given the same query by two different users, a given set of search results can be relevant to one user and irrelevant to another, entirely because of the different intent and information needs.
Most attempts at solving the problem of inferring a user's intent typically depend on relatively weak indicators, such as static user preferences, or predefined methods of query reformulation that are nothing more than educated guesses about what the user is interested in based on the query terms. Approaches such as these cannot fully capture user intent because such intent is itself highly variable and dependent on numerous situational facts that cannot be extrapolated from typical query terms.
In some cases, browsers may allow filtering of returned results to block undesired content (such as, parental web site blocking tools). Different browser tools have also been used to remove undesirable search terms in search queries prior to sending these terms to search engines. However these attempts have been designed to block content and may not evaluate or improve quality of search results.
Systems and methods are needed that improve the quality of results for users.